March saw many examples of data science in action, with its impact demonstrated in a great number of fields, including human behavior, politics, healthcare, economics, corporate boardrooms, and more. Here’s our roundup of the top data science news of the month, both from Pivotal and beyond.

In this Pivotal Conversations Podcast episode (the first!), Coté talks with Andrew Clay Shafer about “platforms” vs. “Platform as a Service.” We discuss all the operational and architectural concerns scurrying about under the tip of the iceberg known as PaaS. While we certainly have the best PaaS out there, it’s just a slice of what the overall Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform provides. Here, we explore what we’re talking about, exactly.

Pivotal is now offering bundled managed capacity in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry software subscription, at no additional cost. Enterprises can take advantage of this new capability as a way to accelerate the adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry in an organization, as well as offering diverse cloud options for different workloads.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry can now deploy applications natively on Amazon Web Services, offering a single deployment experience across public and private clouds. This multi-cloud accessibility ensures applications can be easily migrated between any supported cloud - public or private. Offering a true hybrid cloud approach.

This week, EMC is announcing a major milestone for companies looking to transform how they approach big data, namely a massive cross-company solution that is in many ways a one-stop-shop, best-of-breed, silver bullet CIOs have been looking for to help them succeed. Called the Federation Business Data Lake, this solution combines the hardware, software and all the connected engineering to give companies the foundation to fulfill their data and development needs.

In this guest post from Brian Gallagher, President, EMC Cloud Management Division, and second degree black belt, introduces EMC's first Cloud Foundry "Dojo" in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a lab where developers can benefit from working directly with masters and advance to create new innovations through the art of code writing.

Large companies such as GE and Intuit have used Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup" to help their organizations build more innovative working cultures. With his next book, "The Leader's Guide," offered exclusively via a Kickstarter campaign, Eric provides new insights on implementing and making the most of his methods. Pivotal is aligned with Eric on corporate transformation—allowing companies to emerge as modern, successful software organizations. As explained in this post, Eric’s vision and Pivotal’s proven software development products and services will help lead the industry towards a dramatically more effective and innovative future, helping companies compete more effectively with the most innovative and disruptive of start-ups.

One of the key design patterns needed to deploy a new, or migrate an existing, application to the cloud is robust session state management. This session state must be outside the business logic, and be able to scale independently of other layers. This week, Simon is joined by Adib Saikali, a senior field engineer at Pivotal, to discuss how the new Spring Session meets these needs for java developers.

Open source software, IoT, and devops are featured in this month's Build Newsletter, the monthly snapshot of the most relevant news and trends for architects and developers. We cover the debate around the Open Data Platform and the open sourcing of our own Pivotal Greenplum, GemFire, and HAWQ technologies. There are also highlights of some the latest news on Apache, Spring, Groovy, Node.js, Apple, and Docker. Some key facets of the IoT landscape are captured, and there is a collection of great articles on devops.

Stable industries that were previously dominated by entrenched leaders are now being disrupted by companies with software at their core. Companies like Square, Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, and Tesla have significant brand recognition and rapidly increasing private market valuations. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a platform that was developed to raise the abstraction level to that of applications and services needed to rapidly deliver software, allowing for a renewed focus on the delivery of business value via software. But this value cannot be achieved by simply forklifting existing workloads onto the platform. To maximize the value obtained from the platform, the enterprise must migrate to cloud-native application architectures. At Pivotal, we’re constantly asked by customers “How do we get there?” To help answer that question, Pivotal's Matt Stine wrote a new e-book, available today, called Migrating to Cloud-Native Application Architectures, published by O’Reilly Media, Inc.